Md. Sourov Hossain Mithun
Making a budget for anything helps us a lot to manage money. Especially for students, while studying in colleges or universities, it’s an important task to make a budget for each semester. Because most of the students had to pass a struggling time for money, especially while studying abroad. Making a budget in excel is a quite good choice because Excel has a lot of features that help to manage and understand budgets. I hope this article will be a proper guide to make a college budget in Excel.
Download Practice Workbook
You can download the free Excel workbook from here to practice or use it for making your college budget.
Considerable Sections to Make a College Budget in Excel
To make a college budget, we’ll explain it in the below 4 sections.
Calculate Monthly Income
First, we’ll calculate the monthly income of a student to make a college budget.
- For that, I made a dataset where I will place the income sectors and amounts. And applied some formats to look it better.
- Here, I placed the amount of every sector and then used the SUM function in C8 to find the total income.
- Later, I used conditional formatting to represent the range of each income amount visually. It will help us to understand the amount range visually at a glance.
- Here’s the final outlook of the monthly income. If you have more income sectors then add them.
Read more: How to Do Budgeting and Forecasting in Excel (2 Suitable Ways)
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Calculate Monthly Expenses
Now, we’ll calculate the monthly expenses excluding the semester expenses.
- Here, I have added all possible monthly expense sectors like house rent, phone bill, internet bill, etc.
- After that, placed the sector’s amount and again used the SUM function to find the total expenses in C19.
- Next, I applied conditional formatting to the amounts like the previous section.
- It’s the final outlook. Now it’s looking pretty cool, right?
Calculate Each Semester’s Expenses
Each college has a different duration for a semester. It can be 4,5 or 6 months. However, first, we’ll calculate the total cost of a semester here.
Steps:
- In a new sheet, I have placed the possible expense sectors of a semester.
- Later, applied the SUM function to find the total semester cost in Cell C8.
- Again applied the same conditional formatting to the amounts.
The final outlook after applying the conditional formatting.
Summary of College Budget
In our last section, we’ll now see the summary of our income and expense calculations. Let, the semester duration is 6 months.
Steps:
- As we have only one section of total income, so I placed it directly in Cell B5 by using the following formula-
='Monthly Income'!C8
- Then placed the monthly expenses in Cell D5, using the formula given below-
='Monthly Expenses'!C19
now, we’ll calculate each semester’s cost by dividing the total cost of a semester by semester duration.
- Insert the following formula in Cell D6–
='Semester Expenses'!C8/6
- Finally, just used the SUM function to get the total expenses including each semester’s cost.
- Lastly, to get the difference between the income expense, applied the manual formula as given below-
=B5-D7
Read more: How to Prepare Annual Budget for a Company in Excel
Conclusion
I hope the above procedures will be good enough to make a college budget in Excel. Feel free to ask any questions in the comment section and give me feedback. Visit ExcelDemy to explore more.
